Your customers should not be able to ask your agent about internal pricing, HR policies, or employee onboarding. Your employees should not get customer-facing answers when they need internal process documentation. The same agent can serve both audiences - but only if you tell it which content belongs to which.

Every source and snippet in Outlearn has an accessibility setting: Public or Internal. This single setting determines whether your agent uses that content when talking to customers, team members, or both. Get it right and your agent is appropriately helpful for everyone it talks to. Get it wrong and the wrong people see the wrong content. 

In this article, you'll learn:

• What Public and Internal mean
• How accessibility works at the source level and snippet level
• How to set and change accessibility
• When to use each setting

What Do Public and Internal Mean?

This is not about hiding content from your agent - it's about controlling which audience that content is served to. An Internal snippet won't appear in a conversation with a public user, even if it's the most relevant answer.

Where Accessibility Is Controlled

You can set accessibility at two levels:

Source Level

Controls the default accessibility for the entire source - every snippet inside it inherits this setting unless overridden individually.

Snippet Level

Controls the accessibility of a single snippet, independently of the source it belongs to. This lets you have a mostly Public source with a few Internal snippets inside it - or vice versa.

How to Set Accessibility

When Adding a Source

During the connection flow for most integrations, you'll be asked to choose accessibility as part of the setup. For example, when connecting your Helpjuice knowledge base, you'll see options for Public, Internal, and Private during the final step before syncing.

After a Source Is Connected

1. Go to the Sources tab.
2. Find the source in your list.
3. Click the accessibility dropdown next to it.
4. Select Public or Internal.

The change takes effect immediately.

For Individual Snippets

1. Go to the Sources tab.
2. Click the arrow (›) next to the source to expand it and see its snippets.
3. Click the accessibility dropdown next to the snippet you want to change.
4. Select Public or Internal.

When to Use Each Setting

Use Public when:

• The content is safe and appropriate for any user to see
• You're using the agent as a customer-facing support chatbot
• The information doesn't contain sensitive company details

Use Internal when:

• The content contains sensitive information (pricing structures, internal policies, HR content)
• The source is only relevant to logged-in team members
• You're running an internal agent for employees and want to keep that content separate from your public-facing agent

Best Practices

• Default new sources to Public unless you have a specific reason not to - it's easier to restrict later than to wonder why your agent isn't answering questions.
• If you run both a public customer agent and an internal team agent, use Internal to keep employee-only content out of customer conversations.
• Review your accessibility settings after any major content update - especially if you've added new articles or snippets that contain sensitive information.
• Use snippet-level accessibility to handle exceptions cleanly, rather than creating a separate source just to control one or two pieces of content.